Mobile had the fourth-fastest growth in Alabama. Huntsville continued to set the pace, growing 4.7 percent. It was trailed by Florence-Muscle Shoals and Tuscaloosa, which each grew slightly faster than 4 percent.

Neighboring Pascagoula, after two years of torrid growth, had the seventh-worst performance in the nation, with its economy shrinking by 2.8 percent.

The economy grew in 304 metro areas and shrank in 62, almost the reverse of 2009, where the economy grew in only 71 urban areas during the worst year of the recession.

Regional economies

Mobile County's total economic output grew slightly faster than the national average in 2010. Here are regional metro areas, with the size of their economies in 2010 and the inflation-adjusted change from 2009:

Mobile: $15.84 billion, 2.7 percent

Birmingham: $53.83 billion, 0.8 percent

Huntsville: $20.90 billion, 4.7 percent

Montgomery: $14.93 billion, 1.1 percent

Pascagoula: $7.67 billion, -2.8 percent

Gulfport-Biloxi: $10.29 billion, 0.5 percent

Pensacola: $14.16 billion, 1.6 percent

Fort Walton Beach: 9.48 billion, -0.3 percent

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

The figures are meant to sum up all of the economic activity in an urban area in the same way that gross domestic product does for the nation. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which compiles the data, doesn't compute figures for non-metro counties including Baldwin County, which is classified as a micropolitan area.

Metro areas as a whole contained $13.1 trillion, or 90 percent, of the $14.5 trillion in gross domestic product in 2010.

The New York metro area alone had a $1.3 trillion economy. In Alabama, the 10 metro areas wholly contained within the state accounted for 78 percent of its $172.6 billion economy in 2010.

The biggest contributor to growth in the Mobile area was professional and business services, which added 1.08 percentage points to local growth. That area includes oil spill-cleanup activities. Also expanding was manufacturing, which grew 0.92 percentage points. Both those sectors grew much more strongly in Mobile County than they did nationally.

Also outperforming their national peers were transportation and utilities, natural resources and mining, construction and other services. Notably worse were financial activities and trade.

Pascagoula was dragged down by a 3.65 percentage point decline in manufacturing. The area got a big boost from oil refining last year, and that appears to have reversed this year. Several other metro areas with heavy oil-refining presence flipped from strong growth in 2009 to contraction in 2010, including Casper, Wyo., and Mount Vernon-Anacortes, Wash. Vallejo-Fairfield, Calif., another refining town, shrank the most at 3.8 percent.

Elizabethtown, Ky., grew the most, at 14.4 percent, thanks to rising military spending there. The San Jose, Calif., area grew the second-fastest, thanks to blistering increases in manufacturing, information technology and professional services in Silicon Valley. Increases in big-ticket manufacturing, information technology and oil and gas exploration drove many of the other fastest-growing areas.